John Edward Hasse via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from John Edward Hasse:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: John Edward Hasse
- City: Washington, D.C.
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
-
Bio:
Hasse is a music historian, pianist, and award-winning author and record producer. He serves as Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where he was founding Executive Director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, an acclaimed bigband, and where he founded the national Jazz Appreciation Month, celebrated every April throughout the U.S.
Hasse is the author of a critically acclaimed biography, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington,with a foreword by WyntonMarsalis, and the editor of a major illustrated history, Jazz: The First Century,with forewords by Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones.
Library Journal called the book “a major contribution to the understanding of jazz.” At the Smithsonian, Hasse was co-Director of America’s Jazz Heritage, a 10-year, $7-million partnership with the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He led the Institution’s efforts to acquire the 200,000-page Duke Ellington archive, and curated the traveling exhibition Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington,which toured to 12 museums and 50 libraries. He also led the museum’s initiative to acquire the archives of Ella Fitzgerald, and co-curated the exhibition Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song. He is editor of Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music; producer-annotator of the two-CD set Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington; and producer author of the book and three disc set The Classic Hoagy Carmichael.
Hasse earned a B.A. Cum Laude at Carleton College, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University, and in 2001 Walsh University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. He also holds a Certificate in Business Administration from The Wharton School, and formerly worked in marketing management for Procter & Gamble. He served as the principal advisor to the U.S. Postal Service on its stamp series Legends of American Music that began with Elvis Presley. He has earned two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in writing on music, and two Grammy Award nominations. A talented educator, he is a popular lecturer and recitalist. He has presented programs throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, and Asia. As an expert on 20th century American music, he has been interviewed on television (CNN, Headline News, PBS, CBS’ Sunday Morning, Entertainment Tonight,etc.), on radio (National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition, the Voice of America, BBC, etc.), and in newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times,The Wall Street Journal,etc.).
Hasse is a contributor to seven encyclopedias.
Contact Information
- Email: john@johnedwardhaase.com
- Telephone: 202 595-1818
My Media & Markets
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
